What's in the Rig? #1: John Russell from Gnawing
The power of the Vox AC30, cycling through fuzz pedals, what went on the board for a run of dates with Fucked Up and people jacking up the prices of cheap gear on Reverb with John from Gnawing.
Hello! Thanks for coming to What’s in the Rig? I’m guessing if you’re here, you either follow me on Twitter or read my other newsletter where I actually discuss albums. I tweeted out a bait/feeler tweet last week to see if people would be interested in a newsletter idea I was kicking around, kind of taking the concept of Premier Guitar’s Rig Rundowns video series and Tape Op Magazine, but bringing it more to the bands in the punk/DIY scene that are typically ignored by those types of features. As my buddy John’s band, Gnawing, just released their second full-length, Modern Survival Techniques, last month on Refresh Records, it seemed like a natural place to start. Had a really fun, wide-ranging chat with John touching on the gear they used in the studio during recording, how it’s changed from previous records, what they used on the road after the album on a string of dates with Fucked Up, and a bunch of other topics. Enjoy, and since this is our first post here and I’d love to continue going with this, subscribe if it isn’t too much trouble!
Hey John, do you want to start by just giving us just a general overview of the rig? What kind of guitars, amps and pedals are you using?
So it has evolved a lot, but currently, my main guitar is a 2018 Gibson SG Jr. reissue of the original 1960s ones, so it just has the single P90 in it. That goes into my pedalboard, which right now is a Korg Pitchblack tuner, into a $30 Klon Klone which I really love and that rips, a [Crowther] Hotcake, a Park Fuzz [reissue by Earthquaker Devices] but I’m kind of always changing my fuzz pedal. I bounce between this and a Big Muff-style fuzz. But the Park goes into my Dunlop Crybaby Wah, into the Caroline Guitar Company Meteore - which is a modulated reverb pedal, into the last pedal in my chain which is always my [MXR] Phase 90. And all of that goes into my Vox AC30.
With that Vox, I know they have the AC30 now that’s like just the Top Boost channel and a few other variations of the amp, is it the standard AC30 or one of those other ones?
Yeah, it’s the AC30 CC2, so it has the Top Boost and Normal channels. It’s very standard, but I took the stock speakers that were in it which I didn’t love and found a guy who had two Celestion Greenback speakers that he had sent to Weber [Speakers] to recone and they had one speaker reconed to their [alnico] Blue Dog and the other speaker reconed to their [ceramic] Silver Bell, so I had that hybrid in there and it opened that amp up. I think the AC30 is the perfect guitar amp, especially if you’re going to play dirty, it’s just the best overdrive sound. But once I put those speakers into the amp, it just really opened up and the Top Boost channel became super expressive and clear, it’s cool.
That’s sick. With having a pretty specific amp that’s definitely versatile but still has a specific sound, and then a one-pickup guitar that is also known for a pretty specific sound, was there any sort of reasoning or inspiration that led to picking those for your rig?
So, when I started Gnawing, I had finished up this heavy shoegaze band, so I was using my Jazzmaster, which I liked a lot but was a little too brittle and chimey for Gnawing. Also, especially with the first tape and 7” for Gnawing, I definitely could not beat the “J. Mascis-worship” allegations, so pretty quickly I was like “I’m never playing a Jazzmaster again!” [laughs]. Every interview or every piece was like “Dinosaur Jr. ripoff from Richmond, VA” and it’s like “oh, cool…”
So I stopped playing the Jazzmaster and just wanted something a little more chunky, especially when we were still a three-piece. I wanted something with humbuckers, so I got one of those [Fender] Telecaster Deluxe reissues with the two humbuckers. That is pretty consistently used and is my go-to backup and is on Modern Survival Techniques a ton. I loved that, but I always kind of wanted an SG shape. I found an SG Special, with the mini-humbuckers, around the time Garrett [Whitlow] joined the band as the second guitarist, but as a true Lemonheads-head, I always loved the way the SG Jr. looked with the one pickup and thought [Evan] Dando looked so cool with his.
I’m also pretty simple with gear. The idea that I would never have to switch pickups and I don’t have to adjust volume or tone for a second pickup, that’s just so nice to me. I like to get everything as condensed and basic as possible. With the new record, everything is so much more direct, and a big thing going into the record was wanting to focus less on tap-dancing with pedals and more on just rocking out and having fun, so we condensed pedalboards a lot, and the less I have to do on stage the better. So, long story short, the AC30 was always a classic and thee amp outside of a Marshall. Then, loving Dando, the SG Jr. was always thee guitar, and knowing they make a great combination, it was just like “This is it, this is my tone forever.”
You had mentioned going through a couple of different fuzz pedals in the past, is that more a release-to-release thing or just always experimenting with different sounds?
It’s even from song to song. On the first full-length [2021’s You Freak Me Out; Refresh Records], it was mostly the Caroline Guitar Company Shigeharu, and then this time we brought a ton of fuzz pedals with us, just to have options. It’s kind of the one thing I change. Like I’m always going to have a Phase 90, I’m always going to have a Crybaby, so it’s just trying different flavors with fuzz. A bunch of the stuff on the new record is the Caroline Hawaiian Pizza, I actually didn’t have the Earthquaker Park Fuzz during the recording until right before we left for tour. So a bunch of the stuff on the record is from the Caroline Shigeharu and Hawaiian Pizza and then right before we left to record, my wife got me for my birthday the J. Mascis signature Big Muff [from Electro-Harmonix], which I think is just a re-packaged Triangle Muff. That did a ton of heavy lifting on the leads. Almost all of the solos are that and those are either played on that SG or a [Fender Made-in-Mexico] Stratocaster I have, there’s actually a ton of Strat on the record. I had a huge Strat phase in 2022, it was cool. I had just seen Pavement and I left that show like “I’m gonna buy a Strat” [laughs].
You guys went on a run of dates recently after the record’s release with Fucked Up [and Restraining Order and Dark Thoughts], did you pick up anything for the pedalboard for those dates?
Yes, that Park Fuzz I mentioned, because it was like two weeks before the tour and I just needed to impulse buy something. I had just watched a rig thing with Steve Turner and Mark Arm from Mudhoney, and like [their 1988 EP] Superfuzz Bigmuff, Steve used to have a Big Muff and Mark had a [Univox] Super Fuzz, but Mark doesn’t use the Super Fuzz anymore, he has a Park. So on the record, Garrett does a lot more of the Muff thing, he has a [Way Huge] Swollen Pickle. We used Mudhoney as a reference point for a lot of the stuff on this record and I was thinking we should really dig into their thing, so he’ll do the Big Muff and I’ll do the Super Fuzz. I picked up the Park Fuzz and I love it. It’s really great for lead stuff, but it has the classic fuzz problem of not tracking with chords so well, so I think I’m going to swap it for a Big Muff, but yeah.
Was there anything on the record, thinking more maybe the last two tracks [“Cool/Uncool” and “Amherst Jam”] where before the run of dates with Fucked Up, where you were maybe unsure of how you’d replicate it live?
Yeah, there is. Definitely, with “Cool/Uncool,” we’re obviously not the type of band to bring out an acoustic playing live and then switch mid-song to electric, so we’ve thought about doing quieter solo electric before the full band comes in. But we didn’t do that on the tour, we were for sure like “This wouldn’t land with the Fucked Up crowd.” And the stuff that we’d be able to play live but would be the most complicated is “I Saw a Ghost,” which is a little shoegaze-y with more going on than a lot of the other songs. We ran it a couple of times before the tour but didn’t really get to a point where we really loved the way it sounded, so we didn’t do it, but I’m hoping that we do in the future. I like that song a lot and it’s a different angle for us, so it’d be cool.
But for the most part, the rest of the record and especially the singles, a lot of the record was trying to make it exactly so we can play the parts live. So much of the last record was us being a three-piece and like overdub city with 30 guitars on basically every song. Even after adding Garrett on guitar, there’s still stuff where we’re okay with it not sounding exactly like the record live but there’s still like little lead licks where it’d be cool to play but there’s no way I can play and sing that at the same time. And so with the new one, it was really like stripping back to total basics to get everything to be as close as we can get it on the record to how it’ll sound live. That was the goal.
Mentioning “I Saw a Ghost,” it has that part at the end with the super modulated, kind of stereo-wide sound to it. Was that the Phase 90, a different pedal, or just an added-in-post kind of effect?
That lead part was our drummer [Christian Monroe] taking my [Boss] Space Echo, and we took the stereo outs and sent them one to Garrett’s amp and one to my amp. We took that live signal and Tim [Falen/producer] kind of rode the knobs manually. That was cool. I think it’s easy to automate that stuff now with plugins, but we were actually riding the knobs while mixing. It was cool to watch Tim doing that.
With a track like “My Big Flaw,” it seems like you have, underneath the fuzz, some clean guitars in the mix as well. Was that also the Gibson or using something else more specifically for cleans?
Yeah, so in the past we would have layered that in with a separate clean track and kind of hard stop, adding in a new track with the fuzz coming in. On this track and on the whole record, it was just me and Garrett in the guitar room, and you can even hear at some points us stepping on the pedals during the tracking. That was the whole thing, we want to be able to play this live with minimal overdubs on the record, so any time there’s a clean tone on the record, it’s the same guitars and amps and when the distortion comes in, it’s just us live on the same track kicking on the pedal.
With “Cool/Uncool” and “Amherst Jam,” you have the acoustic, which reminded me a bit of “Crenshaw Ave.” off You Freak Me Out. What acoustic were you using for those two tracks, and is it the same as the last record?
It was, yeah. “Cool/Uncool” started with me doing a scratch track for the drums on my acoustic, which is this super shitty old Yamaha that has a huge crack in the body, so it loses a ton of volume. I’ve had it since like the 10th grade, it was my first guitar, so it’s been beaten. But I was using that to track scratch guitars, and Tim brought his nice Martin acoustic, and that’s the same acoustic on all of You Freak Me Out, and so we re-tracked the parts with the Martin. But my Yamaha has this fun feature of always going out of tune, like with any sort of mustard on your playing at all, it just immediately goes out of tune. So, listening back to the scratch, we were like, it’s kind of cool and falls in line with having “Amherst Jam” be this seven-minute outro of “Cool/Uncool” and the whole record, so the longer the outro goes, the flatter and flatter the Yamaha would get out of tune. So what we did is on the actual proper song part of “Cool/Uncool,” we re-tracked with Tim’s Martin, but as “Amherst Jam” comes in, I think I play out like the first eight measures on the Martin but then we fade back in the shitty Yamaha scratch track.
Going towards the other half of what you do with Gnawing, was there any specific gear you remember for vocals during recording? I’m sure live you’re kind of at the mercy of venues, but did you guys bring anything specifically for recording or did Tim bring anything to the studio?
Yeah, so when we tour or play local gigs, we bring our own [Shure] SM57s. We started doing that as a COVID safety thing, but then we were like “Wait, why did we ever share a mic?” And then especially with Fucked Up, with the way Damian [Abraham, Fucked Up vocalist] performs, it’s just gross [laughs]. I don’t want his spit, he doesn’t want my spit. So we started touring with our own SM57s, which is really the only nerdy thing I do with mics, that I have a SM57 because Tom Petty did. The rest of that, our drummer was engineering with Tim producing, and of course, they were like “It’s cool Tom Petty does it, but we’re not using that for the record” [laughs]. I don’t know what they brought in specifically, but they had two really cool, specific mics they brought in and they sounded awesome, but that’s more their field. I do remember being like “Since this is kind of our ‘Jam Econo,’ record, can we use the 57s?” and they were just like “Absolutely not” [laughs].
Do you find that you tend to buy gear most specifically for the band in kind of a utilitarian, fulfilling-a-need way or do you still buy stuff for yourself just to have or collect?
Yeah, just to have around, I’m constantly lurking Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for basically any pedal that’s under $50 or whatever and looks cool or fucked up and I’ll grab it. Worst case scenario, I play it and it sounds like shit, and I just release it back into the used stream of stuff. I do a lot of catch-and-release with pedals. But yeah, I try to get stuff, even if it’s not a staple with Gnawing, just to have extra flavors. That’s like that Strat I mentioned. I don’t play it a ton, but when you need a Strat, it’s kind of the only thing that does that. Nothing else can do that Mike McCready [Pearl Jam, duh] thing and sometimes you need to sit in your room and play “Yellow Ledbetter.” The Strat is the only thing that does it.
And then there’s this 12-string guitar, my electric 12-string. It’s like a weird 1970s Korean guitar by a brand called Starfire. The guy I got it from was the original owner and he put 1970s DiMarzio pickups in it, so the pickups are worth like quadruple the guitar itself, but it’s really cool. It’s like a Gibson ES-335 body style with this giant headstock on it and it’s our go-to thing for adding an extra layer to a song, just to make it jangly. It got cut from pretty much everything on Modern Survival Techniques, I think it’s only on two songs. This record, while still poppy, is a bit darker than the previous one and a 12-string just doesn’t sound dark, it’s very bright and jangly.
Is it on a good amount of You Freak Me Out?
Yes, it is on almost everything. It does the little Beatles lead on “Contract” before the bridge, it’s all over “So Glad” and it’s definitely on “Crenshaw Ave.” because we wanted the Big Star and The Byrds thing. It’s on a bunch of that record, yeah. And then it’s all over the self-titled tape that I did myself and both the songs on the 7” [2020’s Shaky].
I know you’re also in an Oasis cover band, and I’m always obsessed with that band, so I was curious if you have a separate rig for that cover band outside of the Gnawing stuff.
I do, which is insane. So I have a 1970s solid-state Marshall amp that, without the tubes, just has like the drive channel of a JCM 800 built into it. So I just crank that, and then I have an Epiphone ES-335 that I use to get my full Bonehead [Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs of Oasis] sound. So, yes, I have a separate Oasis rig [laughs].
If you had to pick one piece of your rig for Gnawing that you’d say is most integral to your tone, what would that be?
I think if you would have asked me at any other point of the band, I’d say my Phase 90, it’s just all over every release we’ve done. I love phaser and it’s a wonderful, insane pedal. But at this point, it’s the AC30. On one of the shows of the Fucked Up tour, on the first song, I was having an issue with one of the cables in the pedalboard and I was like “fuck this,” so I just grabbed my cable and went straight into the amp. I noticed, like, there wasn’t a boost here or a fuzz there, but it still came across the same I think. I finally understood all the blues lawyers that get a Dumble and are like “It’s all in the amp!” So now I think the key piece is the bright, chimey distortion of the AC30’s Top Boost.
For a last question, money no object, do you have a White Whale-type gear purchase that you’d love to have someday?
Oh man, I would love an original 1960s SG Jr. that isn’t a reissue. 1961 is the year that I always look at. When we were in Chicago on the Fucked Up tour, we went to Chicago Music Exchange and they had a white 1961 SG Jr. just like Dando’s and it was beaten to shit but looked perfect and it was like “This is it for sure,” and of course I looked at the price tag and it was $13,000 or something and it was like “okay, cool, nevermind” [laughs] but that’s definitely it.
Right, I used to live there and when I was like 15 or whatever, I went to CME to try to grab whatever intro guitar I wanted and, I love that store now, but even then it was like “hmm, maybe I’ll actually take my $300 to Guitar Center” [laughs].
Totally, I feel like prices on everything used have just skyrocketed since 2020. Like, on used guitars especially, I was looking at a Yamaha Revstar on Reverb.com and it was like “I got that in 2015 for like $300 and now you want $750 for one?”
Yeah, it’s like that for amps too now.
Yeah, definitely amps, especially Peavey stuff. I used to be a big Peavey collector and everything Peavey was like always $100. And now people are like “I know what I have!” and it’s like, no, this is a ripoff of a ripoff of a [Fender] Blues Jr., you can’t be pretending this is some nice amp, that was the entire point of the cheap Peaveys.
It’s all from that COVID show where Josh Homme [Queens of the Stone Age] was on with Mark Ronson like “This $100 Peavey amp is my sound.”
Right! “The [Peavey] Decade is the key to my tone,” and then Decades go from like $20 to $400, and it’s like “You people are crazy.” I have a Decade. It sounds like shit. That’s the cool thing about it: you crank it and it sounds awful [laughs].
Right, right. It’s also, like, I’m sure that’s what Josh Homme used to record Songs for the Deaf in a huge studio with tons of layers and Eric Valentine producing. You’re not going to buy a Peavey Decade and sound like that record [laughs].
Totally, and then especially with that, it’s totally counter to what he was saying. He wasn’t saying “Jack up the market for Decades, they’re these great amps,” he was saying “You can use cheap, discarded gear and get badass tones from it.” I totally buy into that. Some of my favorite pedals are like DOD Electronics and Joyo Audio stuff. It’s just crazy.
Thanks once again to John for chatting about gear and thanks to y’all for reading, looking forward to posting more of these. Make sure to check out Gnawing’s new record, Modern Survival Techniques. Subscribe and pass it around, thanks!